Michel Vinaver is a French playwright, born in 1927, who was exiled to the USA during the German occupation, and began to write in the 1950s – alongside a business career until 1982, when he became Professor of Drama Studies in the University of Paris. His complete plays have recently been published in two volumes by Actes Sud, and are widely-produced in France – but in the following article he claims that his few British productions, at the Orange Tree in Richmond and the Traverse in Edinburgh, have often been closer to his textual intentions. This is one of the problems he examines in the following wide-ranging article on the successes and limitations of the French post-war policy of theatrical Decentralization. Against the benefits of financial security and non-metropolitan bias, he weighs the failures to reflect regional cultures, and the cult of the director, with its continuous pressures to be ‘different’ in the interests of promotion and critical prestige. This paper was first presented at a conference at Birmingham University in April 1990. Readers with access to copies of the original Theatre Quarterly may also find it useful to refer to the special issue on People's Theatre in France, TQ23 (1976).

It has only been in the last few years that the plays of Michel Vinaver have begun to be discovered and produced in Britain. Yet he has been working as a playwright in his native France since 1955, and has become increasingly respected and widely produced there since overcoming a seven-year ‘writer's block’ in 1967. Here, David Bradby's introduction to Vinaver's dramaturgy is followed by a detailed analysis of one of his most recent plays, L'Emission de télévision, and this critical material is complemented by a chronology of Vinaver's career, excerpted statements by and about the writer – including an ‘auto-interview’ of Vinaver by Vinaver – and a bibliography. David Bradby is Professor of Drama and Head of the Department of Drama and Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London: he has published widely, especially on the French theatre, and his major study, Modern French Drama, 1940–1990, has recently appeared in a revised edition from Cambridge University Press. He is currently working on a study of Vinaver for the University of Michigan Press. Michel Vinaver's own assessment of the present state of French theatre funding was included in NTQ25 (1991).

In the first of two essays, Peter Nicholls explores connections between ideas of an ‘absolute’ or non-representational theatre and the forms of narrative and discursivity which have traditionally invested dramatic forms. In one of the earliest Expressionist plays – Oskar Kokoschka's Murder, Hope of Women – the tension between these ideas is powerfully in evidence. Nicholls shows how Kokoschka's formal experimentalism is grounded in contemporary polemics about gender and sexuality, tracing the ways in which theatrical innovation seeks to evade the Oedipal constraints of plot and narrative. That tension, he believes, informs subsequent Expressionist drama, where an almost obsessive preoccupation with the working-through of family histories is contested by forms of theatrical ‘affect’ which undermine structure from within. Peter Nicholls's second essay will pursue the ‘anti-Oedipal’ implications of Dada and Surrealist theatre. The author teaches English and American literature at the University of Sussex, and his publications include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing, and articles on postmodernism, contemporary poetry, and French Cubism. His Modernisms: a Literary Guide will be published by Macmillan later this year.

Is there a postmodernist theatre – and if so, what was the modernist theatre? What qualifies as avant-garde – and for how long? And why does the ‘established’ alternative theatre lean so heavily on appropriation, whether of ancient myths or contemporary ideologies – such as postmodernism? Graham Ley uses analogies from dance and design to explore our perceptions of and attitudes towards those contemporary theatre practitioners who may once have broken boundaries, but now often head the queue for lavish corporate finance. Graham Ley has taught in universities in England, Australia, and New Zealand, and his Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theatre will shortly appear from the University of Chicago Press.

The regular community drama activity of the village of Monticchiello in Italy has been pursued for nearly a quarter of a century, but is still little known abroad. A full study of the phenomenon is as much a study of the community, past and present, as it is a piece of theatrical analysis, in the area where there is a complete interlock between social history and the theatrical activity which a society produces. Since the work and history of the Teatro Povero have too many ramifications for everything to be summarized or even alluded to in one article, Richard Andrews here sets out to introduce the subject to students of theatre ‘by example’ – aiming to dig a single trench into the strata, in order to convey the outlines of the subject, hopefully without damage to the evidence needed for a more complete survey. Richard Andrews is Professor of Italian at Leeds University, having previously taught at Swansea and Kent. For the past fifteen years his research interests have been mainly concentrated on theatrical material, and he is currently preparing a study of sixteenth-century Italian comedy for Cambridge University Press. His regular contact with Monticchiello dates from 1983, and has been supported by a systematic analysis of all the texts produced there since 1967.

So close was the relationship between women and the Irish literary and theatrical renaissance that the severely diminished feminist role in contemporary Irish cultural and theatrical life contrasts all the more revealingly with the early achievements. In this article, which is an expanded version of a paper given at the 1990 conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research at Glasgow University, Steve Wilmer etches in the historical perspective, notably the significance of women's writing to the nationalist as well as the suffragist movement, and outlines the present situation, in which the solid advances being made by women directors and administrators are only slowly being reflected in an increase in women's theatre writing and support for feminist theatre groups, let alone the assumption of real theatrical power. Steve Wilmer teaches in the Samuel Beckett Centre at Trinity College Dublin, and is the author of several plays, including Scenes from Soweto.

Sustaining his reputation for production work that is both original and challenging, Edward Bond worked closely with the directors of Jackets during its productions at Lancaster and in Leicester and London in 1989–90. After a mixed experience with the RSC directing his War Plays, Bond continued to develop his concept of ‘theatre events’, and to work towards the particular style of acting that is necessary for his work in performance. Ian Stuart, a doctoral candidate in dramatic art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, analyzes here how the resulting twin concepts of ‘theatre events’ and ‘theatre acting’ translated into practice, exploring both the workin-progress and its realization through setting, lighting, and critical response. Earlier reconstructions and analyses of Bond's plays in production in TQ and NTQ have included features on Lear in TQ5 (1972) and The Fool in TQ21 (1976), both at the Royal Court, and on his own production at the Cottesloe of Summer in NTQ6 (1986).

Yvonne Brewster is best known in Britain as artistic director of Talawa Theatre, but she has also been active in the theatres of Jamaica, Africa, and America, having worked as a drama teacher, television production assistant and presenter, and film director in Jamaica before beginning her international theatre directing career. Talawa was founded in 1985 by four women, with Yvonne Brewster as director, and with the aim of using ‘the ancient African ritual and black political experience of our forebears to inform, enrich, and enlighten British theatre’. Although Talawa has as yet been unable to give the work of black women writers the attention it deserves, the company is itself primarily female: the artistic director and the majority of employees are women, all the designers to date have been women, and so predominantly are the technical and stage management staff. A medium- to large-scale touring company, Talawa worked without a building base until 1991, when the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre became its home. Yvonne Brewster has directed all Talawa's work to date, focusing primarily on productions of the classics with black performers and on introducing the work of black playwrights to British audiences. Her productions have included The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James (1985–86), An Echo in the Bone by Dennis Scott (1986–87), O Babylon! by Derek Walcott (1987–88), Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1988–89), The Gods Are Not to Blame by Ola Rotimi (1989–90), The Dragon Can't Dance by Earl Lovelace (1990–91), and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (1991–92). Yvonne Brewster is also the editor of Methuen's two volumes of Black Plays (1987 and 1989). Here she is interviewed by Lizbeth Goodman, who has just completed her doctoral dissertation on women's theatre in Britain at Cambridge, and is currently working with the Open University.

BRIAN PARKER'S article ‘Bowers of Bliss’ attempts to place the 1986 Oxford edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare in its scholarly, intellectual, and theatrical context, and in the course of doing so offers a number of criticisms of the procedures adopted in that volume, with particular reference to its use in the theatre. Of course, single-volume editions of the complete works are rarely selected for theatrical use, but a number of directors have chosen to base productions on this edition, having photocopies made of the text on which they are working. For them, at least, the edition has seemed to have something special to offer. It seems to me that Professor Parker's criticisms are based on imprecisions of detail and on logical fallacies, and I should like to attempt to correct them.

We are happy to return to the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton, the subject of pioneering studies by Clive Barker in the original Theatre Quarterly, where he used the ‘Brit’ as focus for an overview of the problems of researching nineteenth-century popular theatre in TQ4 (1971), proceeding to a detailed analysis of our knowledge of the nature and composition of the theatre's audiences in TQ34 (1979). Jim Davis now turns to the repertoire of the theatre, and, for one representative decade from 1863 to 1874, explores the sources of the melodramas presented there – a great many of them specially written or adapted by popular ‘house dramatists’. He also examines the values which may be discerned to underlie the most popular plays, and in the process, by going to manuscript sources rather than to the inevitably more ‘respectable’ plays that reached print, uncovers a more radical repertoire than previous authorities had assumed. Jim Davis, who currently teaches in the Theatre Department of the University of New South Wales, has published widely in the field of nineteenth-century theatre, including a survey of nautical melodrama in NTQ14 (1988) and a study of the ‘reform’ of the East End theatres in NTQ23 (1990).